Asteroid 2012 KA to buzz Earth on May 17

May 17, 2012 By Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today

On the heels of a bus-sized asteroid that passed harmlessly between Earth and the orbit of the Moon on May 13, another asteroid between 4.5 and 10 meters (14-33 feet) wide will buzz by at about the same distance on May 17, 2012.

Asteroid 2012 KA was discovered just today (May 16), and is projected to make its closest approach about 0.0015 AU, or 224,397 kilometers (134,933 miles, .6 lunar distances) from Earths surface at 19:43 UTC on Thursday.

The asteroid was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Observatory, and at the time of this writing, is the only observatory that has made any observations. Therefore JPL lists the uncertainty of the orbit as fairly high (9 out of a 1 to 10 scale) but orbital projections from JPLs Small Body Database website confirms there is no chance this asteroid would hit Earth.

However, most stony meteoroids up to a diameter of about 10-meters are destroyed in thermal explosions by plummeting through Earths atmosphere.

Related Stories

OK, we admit thats a bit of an exaggeration, but an asteroid about the size of a school bus did come fairly close to Earth yesterday! On May 13, Asteroid 2012 JU passed harmlessly between Earth and Moon. ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A newly discovered house-sized asteroid will miss the Earth by less than 17,700 km (11,000 miles) on Monday June 27, 2011. Thats about 23 times closer than the Moon. The size and location ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Apostolos Christou and David Asher from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland announced the discovery of an asteroid near Earth called Asteroid 2010 SO16 and their findings were published ...

Several days after Rosetta's close flyby of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 14 February 2015, images taken on this day by OSIRIS, the scientific imaging system on board, have now been downlinked to Earth. ...

Like coins, most comet have both heads and tails. Occasionally, during a close passage of the Sun, a comet's head will be greatly diminished yet still retain a classic cometary outline. Rarely are we left ...

This week marked the completion of an important step on the path to spacecraft assembly, test, and launch operations for the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer ...

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned new images captured on approach to its historic orbit insertion at the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn will be the first mission to successfully visit a dwarf planet when it enters ...

User comments : 0

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.

Javascript is currently disabled in your web browser. For full site functionality, it is necessary to enable Javascript.
In order to enable it, please see these instructions.